Thank you.
I'd like to thank the committee for giving us the opportunity to reaffirm our position. For those of you who are not familiar with our organization, we are a charitable research organization established in 1964, and our focus of research worldwide is the road user. We do a lot of research on impaired drivers.
What I'd like to comment on today is the lowering of the legal limit. There has been a lot of debate about lowering the legal limit. There has been a lot of discussion regarding the scientific evidence. What we're here to do today is look beyond the scientific evidence to the practical impact on the justice system of lowering the legal limit.
Last year our organization completed a national survey of lawyers, both crown and defence counsel, all across Canada. We surveyed more than 1,000 lawyers, and we looked at a number of challenges within the justice system dealing with impaired driving cases. One of the issues we specifically focused on was lowering the legal limit.
I think it's important to point out that lowering the legal limit at a federal level would create a substantial burden on the justice system. If you look at the current situation, the criminal caseload of crown prosecutors is four times that of defence counsel. Impaired driving cases currently account for about 25% of those cases being processed through the system. About a third of the impaired driving cases involve repeat offenders. Lowering the BAC limit would substantially increase the caseloads of lawyers and erode the crown's ability to effectively prosecute higher BAC cases and higher-risk offenders. In addition, current inequities in caseload volume between crown and defence counsel would become more pronounced.
A shrinking number of cases are being resolved using plea agreements. A greater number of cases are actually proceeding to trial. Currently, of the impaired driving cases processed through the system, some 40% go to trial because defendants are not willing to negotiate a plea. Obviously, when cases go to trial, this requires more time and resources to resolve the cases.
Clearly, accused are willing to proceed to trial to avoid a criminal conviction. There's no reason to believe that those accused with lower BACs would be any more inclined to negotiate a plea agreement as opposed to going to trial, particularly when the odds of conviction at trial are low.
Defence counsel spend at least twice as many hours and up to four times as many hours as crown counsel in preparing individual cases. Again, these inequities would increase as caseloads grow.
Nationally, prosecutors report that accused are convicted in 52% of cases at trial. Of those cases going to trial, 52% of the accused are convicted. So we're not being as effective in the courtroom as we would like to be. The low likelihood of conviction erodes the specific deterrent effect of impaired driving laws and serves as an incentive for the accused to proceed to trial. In addition, the amount of time it takes for cases to be resolved in court has grown substantially and will continue to grow.
On the issue of lowering the legal BAC, fewer than 40% of crown prosecutors agree with this option.
If you look at the volume of cases currently being handled administratively at the 0.05 level, there are 47,000 cases. On average, we do about 50,000 criminal cases a year. There are 47,000 administrative suspensions, not counting Ontario, Quebec, which obviously would be implicated in 0.05, and Alberta. So we can expect the number of cases to double.